A few days ago I was lucky enough to attend an outstanding concert of the Pet Shop Boys at the Release Festival. One of the most legendary British pop bands came to Athens for the second time in the last five years, taking the audience on a musical journey through their characteristic electronic sound and the soft, storytelling voice of Neil Tennant.
Of course, among their other songs, they could not help but perform one of their most melodic covers, Go West by the Village People, a cover originally released in 1993, expressing, for many, the belief that the Cold War order of the previous decades was definitively a thing of the past and that the West would establish itself as the place par excellence of the free movement of ideas and prosperity.
In other words, the West, and Europe as an integral part of it, would become the final destination that no one could resist and everyone would, at some point, attempt to turn into their second homeland. And indeed, throughout the entire period that has elapsed since the release of this particular song, population movements towards the European continent have been continuous and purposeful. Geopolitical developments, in the form of armed conflicts, regime changes, velvet and other revolutions, and the impoverishment of population groups, reshaped the already volatile international environment, causing successive migratory flows and mass arrivals to the continent.
The migration of Europe beyond itself
And yet, listening to this particular song today, more than three decades later, I could not help but adopt a different perspective. I wondered if, ultimately, the greatest movement of our time is not that of people towards the West, but the gradual displacement of the West itself away from its historical and value-based self.
If that is indeed the case, modern migratory transformations may not primarily be marked by uncontrolled population flows and the mass settlement of culturally heterogeneous populations in the territory of host countries. Perhaps the above are simply a consequence and aftermath of a deeper identitarian transformation that preceded and took place over time, having at its center the “migration” of a culture, in this case the Western one, outside of its own self and its structural points of reference.
Seen from this perspective, the most significant migratory movement of recent decades may not be connected to the displacement of millions of third-country citizens towards the eastern borders of Greece and the European continent in general, but rather to the slow, almost imperceptible migration of Europe itself beyond the boundaries of its own value-based self-determination.
Collective memory as Europe’s compass
In this light, migration may not be the main event of the post-Cold War era and may simply have become the dominant, visible symptom of a gradual decomposition of the basic European cultural pillars. Perhaps, in other words, the differentiation of human societies is not directly linked to population composition and demographic change but is directly related to the collective memory and the imprint of the conditions that were the driving forces behind the creation of European institutions. This collective memory, moreover, is the eternal mechanism of recognition, identification, and distinction of a society that functions as an evolutionary compass over the centuries. Any definitive demagnetization of it will inevitably lead to the fading of the collective memories and historical experiences that coherently maintained the foundations of historical tradition and heritage.
The political consequences of such a transformation are already becoming visible. Today, Europe finds it very difficult to recognize the problem of migration because, first of all, it is reluctant to understand its existence in its entirety within its full historical context. Similarly, it hesitates to talk about borders and national sovereignty because it gradually ceases to perceive their existential necessity, while it defends itself behind a “veil of guilt” every time the discussion turns to values, as the historical conditions that gave rise to them gradually fade and are forgotten.
The risk of normalized oblivion
If this trajectory continues, social changes will not be experienced as human choices but as something natural, expected, almost predictable, and irreversible. And in this “acceptable naturalness” lies the truly dystopian Cassandrian prognosis: the possibility that, in fifty years, there will no longer be any disagreement, negotiation, or even ideological conflict around migration. Not because mass migratory flows will have stopped, nor because human trafficking and smuggling will have passed into history, but because there will be no one left to remember that there was once a different world, and those who remain will enjoy the Mithridatic immunity of normalized deviance.
In conclusion, civilizations do not only disappear when they are destroyed but also when they self-destruct, and the loss of historical memory is tantamount to social suicide. When future generations are unable to distinguish historical continuity, there will no longer be any need for propaganda or the censorship imposed by political correctness, as oblivion alone will be enough to normalize the irregular and the uncontrolled. Perhaps, then, the great migration of the 21st century does not concern people, but concepts that migrate into words, becoming disconnected from their historical context and their generative causes, and thus an entire continent slowly and silently migrates outside itself without bothering to cross any of its natural boundaries.
Marios Kaleas is the General Director of the Greek Asylum Service and Chairperson of the Management Board of the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA).
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Hellenic Republic, the Greek Public Administration, or the EUAA.